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After almost a year and a half, the biggest merger to date in the media industry finally got the go-ahead.

AT&T, one of the biggest telecom service providers in the US, agreed to buy Time Warner (which owns a host of media companies including Warner Bros, HBO or CNN) in October 2016.

The American Justice Department opposed the deal, arguing that this would result in harmful changes to the pay TV and the cable market environment, including limiting competition and innovation. AT&T won on the argument that the deal would in fact allow them to compete more effectively with giants like Google and Netflix.

Other articles of note

Tom Grater writes in his debrief after CineEurope for Screen Daily about the uncertain future of 21st Century Fox. Regardless of which company will win this bid, we’re expecting Fox to be in a new set up by CineEurope 2019. One attendee noted :

“combining Fox’s presentation, clocking in at more than two hours in length and also including projects from arthouse wing Fox Searchlight and Fox Animation, with Disney’s, which included Pixar, Disney Animation and a section on Marvel, would create a behemoth of a CineEurope presence.”

Current trends, as revealed by a Zenith report, show that in a couple of years US audiences will spend as much as 3 hours searching for things on the internet, browsing on social media, and talking to friends. The report included watching videos through YouTube and Netflix as internet consumption as well.

They note that as much as a quarter of this will be consumed on mobile devices.

In the same time frame, time spent on watching TV is predicted to decrease to just under 170 minutes per day, on average.

According to the report, TV will lose its hold on audiences by 2019 and will be significantly surpassed by internet consumption by 2020.

The picture doesn’t look the same for Europe or Latin America just yet, but the trend applies worldwide. European film and TV businesses should take notice and adapt their audience reach and engagement strategies to ensure their sustainability in the future.

It’s important to note, however, that TV consumption is decreasing at a pace that is slower than that of increase in internet consumption. Which ultimately means that audiences are consuming more media, overall.